A man of true principles.

At first, it seems very odd that the designer of the things shown here could have said: 'The two great rules for design are these: 1st that there should be no features about a building which are not necessary for convenience, construction, or propriety; 2nd that all ornament should consist of enrichment of the essential construction of the building. The neglect of these two rules is the cause of all the bad architecture of the present time ...

'In pure architecture the smallest detail should have a meaning or serve a purpose.'

The extraordinary paradox of Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin's own work and his ideals is highlighted dramatically by the exhibition of his work at the Victoria and Albert Museum, South Kensington, London.

Pugin (1812-1852) was a superb decorator and seemed to be an inexhaustible well of patterns drawn from thirteenth-and fourteenth-century precedents. At the V&A he is shown largely as a decorator.

But for Pugin, Gothic was not only a style; it was a moral crusade. Converted to Roman Catholicism at 23, he invented a vision of the Catholic Middle Ages in which disease, tyranny, torture and repression were ignored and charity, community and closeness to nature were extolled. He wrote (or rather drew) a manifesto, Contrasts (1836), in which idealised Gothic building types were set against their most reductive Utilitarian counterparts of the early nineteenth century.

If Gothic could set the scene in which the true and moral life could be led, Gothic must itself be honest. Pugin's arguments about the necessity of truth to materials and function in design (the quotations at the beginning of this article are taken from his next book, The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture, 1841), are at variance with a lot of his work. He produced a huge amount of buildings in his brief life, mainly for a relatively poor Church which had been politically legitimised only in 1829 and was not always able to pay for the real thing. Yet Pugin revolutionised architecture and design. As George Gilbert Scott recollected: 'Though his actual architecture was scarcely worthy of his genius, the result of his efforts [was] in the revival of "true principles" as well as in the recovery of all sorts of subsidiary arts.'

This irrevocably changed our perceptions of the relationships of art, architecture and society. Secularised, the True Principles: the proposals that the activities of architecture and design exist to improve the lot of humanity in general, and that construction should be based on truth, fuelled the Arts and Crafts and Modern Movements. And they continue to inspire The Architectural Review to this day. P.D.

Exhibition lasts until September 11, 1994. There is an excellent (though oddly sub-edited) catalogue by many percipient scholars published by Yale and the V&A ([pound]45 hardback, [pound]19.95 paperback).